As organizations embrace hybrid and multi-cloud strategies, their Kubernetes footprint is exploding. It’s no longer about managing a single OpenShift cluster; it’s about controlling a fleet of them, spread across data centers, public clouds, and edge locations. This distributed landscape presents a significant management challenge. How do you ensure consistency, enforce security, and deploy applications across dozens or even hundreds of clusters?
This is precisely the problem Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (RHACM) is designed to solve. It provides a single point of control to manage the entire lifecycle of your OpenShift clusters, from creation to retirement, transforming a complex fleet into a manageable and secure domain.
A Single Pane of Glass for Your Entire Fleet
At its core, RHACM gives you a unified view and control over your entire cluster landscape. It allows you to import existing OpenShift clusters or delegate the creation of new ones on supported platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, all from one central console.
Once connected, you get a bird’s-eye view of the health of your entire fleet. You can instantly see which clusters are online, which have issues, and what resources are being consumed across your hybrid cloud environment. This centralized visibility is the foundation for effective fleet management.
Key Capabilities for Fleet Management
RHACM’s power lies in its four key capabilities, which address the most pressing challenges of multi-cluster management.
Multi-cluster Lifecycle Management
Managing the lifecycle of clusters is the first step. With RHACM, you can:
- Create and Destroy: Provision new OpenShift clusters on various cloud providers or on-premise infrastructure directly from the RHACM hub.
- Scale and Upgrade: Centrally manage cluster resources and trigger upgrades for your entire fleet to ensure everything stays up-to-date with the latest security patches and features.
- Hibernation: To save costs, you can place development or non-critical clusters into hibernation, effectively scaling them down to zero when not in use.
Policy and Governance
This is perhaps the most critical capability for enterprise environments. RHACM allows you to define policies and apply them across your fleet to enforce security and configuration standards.
- Centralized Enforcement: You can create a policy—for instance, requiring all clusters to have a specific role-based access control (RBAC) configuration or ensuring all namespaces have resource quotas—and apply it to clusters based on labels (e.g., « production » or « pci-compliant »).
- Configuration Drift: The system continuously monitors clusters for compliance with these policies. If a configuration drifts from the desired state, RHACM can either report the non-compliance or automatically remediate it, ensuring your fleet remains secure and consistent.
Application Lifecycle Management
Deploying and managing applications across multiple clusters can be complex. RHACM simplifies this with a powerful application model based on channels and subscriptions.
- Deploy Once, Distribute Everywhere: You can define an application once and then use placement rules to deploy it to multiple clusters simultaneously. For example, you can deploy a new version of an application to all « development » clusters for testing, and then promote it to all « production » clusters in Europe with a single command.
- GitOps Integration: This model integrates seamlessly with GitOps workflows. You can point a channel to a Git repository, and RHACM will automatically deploy and update applications as changes are pushed to the repository, ensuring consistency between your desired state in Git and the running state on your clusters.
Global Observability
RHACM provides a high-level, multi-cluster view of your applications and infrastructure health. It integrates with tools like Prometheus and Grafana to aggregate data from all managed clusters into the central hub cluster. This allows you to monitor trends, set up global alerts, and troubleshoot issues without having to log in to each individual cluster.
Why It Matters
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management moves organizations from simply having a collection of clusters to managing a true, cohesive fleet. It provides the guardrails and automation needed to operate at scale while maintaining security and control. For any organization serious about leveraging the full power of hybrid cloud with OpenShift, RHACM is not just a useful tool—it’s an essential component for success.
